In this episode, we begin our journey through the first decade of MTV’s 120 Minutes, one of the only national television showcases for your favorite college radio artists. We start with January 1987, where we find a couple of all-time great artists in The The and O.M.D., along with a delightfully unknown-to-us band called Dumptruck.
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120 Months - Episode 1 - Jan 1987 (124 downloads )TRANSCRIPT
And hello, everybody. Welcome to the very 1st inaugural episode of 120 months, a month by month retrospective of 120 minutes. The, uh, I was going to say infamous MTV show, but infamous probably not the word I’m looking for there.
Seminole? I don’t know if that’s really true. I don’t know.
Seminole probably hits closer than… Probably so. My name is Michael Millard.
Keith Porterfield, Scott Mobley. We are talking about, yeah, the show 120 minutes. If you’re not familiar, I don’t think we’re maybe the people or this isn’t probably the time to explain the whole thing to you, but MTV had a show.
Two hours long once a week. I think once they kind of got into the full run of it, where they highlighted, I guess initially what you’d call indie rock, college rock, later alternative rock. Basically bands that didn’t get a lot of airplay on, you know, the mainstream rotation of MTV.
And it was a big deal, I think, for a lot of us. Even those of us. So if you’re coming over here from 35,000 watts, you probably know that the 3 of us all worked in college radio and that’s been, that was the focus of our previous podcast.
And 120 minutes was kind of like, it was kind of like when your favorite college radio band like went to the show and they made it to 120 minutes and you got to see them on in TV and you got to see what they look like probably for the 1st time because, you know, when were you ever going to see a video by, I mean, the, the, I doubt, you know, we’re going to talk about them today. I don’t think they were in a lot of mainstream rotation on MTV. I can assure you that Scott’s choice this week was not in rotation on MTV.
Mine may be so a little bit, but we’ll talk about that too. So yeah, we’re gonna go month by month, each, uh, we’re gonna start in 1987, which is the 1st full year of 120 minutes, and we’re gonna do, hopefully, uh, a full 10 year, the 1st decade of 120 minutes. We’re each gonna pick a song from each month.
And sometimes we’ll talk about the song. Sometimes we’ll talk about the band. Sometimes we’ll use that as a jumping off point to talk about something else entirely, but it’s all kind of to celebrate a show that again, I think meant a lot to us and I think was like kind of required viewing back in the day.
I mean, a lot of times we’d probably record it because it was on Saturday nights and we might be out and about, but I remember watching a lot of VHS tapes of 120 minutes back in the day because it was a thing to, you know, to make sure that, like, did you record it last week? Yeah, I got this one and, you know, sometimes you’d even trade tapes or whatever. So, uh, it was, it was kind of fun to see, you know, college radio to me was like, that was the fire hose, right?
It was on basically 247, not always necessarily 24 hours a day, but like you could hear music all the time. 120 minutes. was like, it was like 2 hours a week where you were going to get to see videos of these bands. So it was a much more, you know, only what, maybe 20, 22 songs a week and bands a week that got chosen to be on that. So it was kind of a big deal to like, if one of your favorite bands or one of your favorite songs made it on there.
And it was also kind of, uh, a way that a lot of bands made that leap from, uh, you know, college radio and maybe just being played on their local stations to to finally getting like the national recognition that that a lot of them deserved and and maybe some of them didn’t deserve. We’ll see. That could be a conversation that comes up at some point.
So we’re going to go around the horn, talk about the songs that we chose from January of 1987. And I’ll kick it off with one of my favorite bands, actually, from the 80s orchestral maneuvers in the dark, otherwise known as OMD. And one of my not favorite songs from that band, which was called We Love You.
I gotta say, I wasn’t super familiar with this song. I do remember it, uh, because I listened to OMD a lot, so a lot of times I’d have one of their albums kind of playing in the background, but coming back around to this song, you know, you remember if you leave, you remember Forever live and die, you remember, you know, some of the earlier stuff like electricity and Tesla girls. I had virtually no memory of this song when I heard it, again, for when I was doing the research for this episode.
And I guess that was kind of for a reason. I was doing some research on OMD, and they kind of considered this, not this song necessarily, but this album as kind of the nadir of their musical output. So this was the last album, and so this song was on, um, the Pacific Age.
That was the last album before one of the founding members left. They stopped recording after this for about 5 years before they kind of started regrouping. Uh, so you’re kind of seeing like the end of of of an era for OMD.
They were, I mean, these guys formed in 1978. So OMD, I don’t think they necessarily get the credit they deserve for being one of the pioneers of electronic music. You know, right after bands like Kraftwork and Devo were kind of starting to forge the path in electronic music.
OMD was starting to record, you know, in the late 70s, and certainly, they were having hits on college radio in like 1980, 1981. So even though I don’t feel like they get talked about as, I don’t I don’t think they get forgotten because they had a couple huge hits, not least of which was if you leave, you know, that’s on the Pretty and Pink soundtrack. So I don’t think people necessarily forget about OMD.
But I don’t necessarily think that they get talked about as like one of the pioneers as much as like New Order or Joy Division or whatever. And they absolutely were. Um, they were, uh, also kind of pioneers of a term that I wasn’t familiar with until, till recently, sophistopop, which is like sophisticated pop music. shop was in there too, I would assume.
I think Spandau Ballet would have to be in that group, right? Johnny H’s Jazz, I think. Roxy music, yeah.
Roxy music. It was a weird term when I when I heard it. And then I was like, actually that’s perfect.
I mean it really was. It was electronic dance music, pop music that also had a little jazz, a little orchestral, you know, music that got mixed in. Um, the songwriting, I think, tended to be a little more, well, sophisticated.
I think is a perfectly good word for that. Ooh, I throw Ultravox in there as well. Like Vienna comes to mind as being maybe like a paragon of sophisticop.
I heard I heard Keith in the background. That’s like Ultravox Vienna, man, that song still holds up so well today, right? One of my all-time favorite songs. from the 80s.
Yeah, absolutely. God, so good. I would think that that would be, and it’s funny. saying this as I think they would fit.
I think they would fit, because I didn’t really go down like a rabbit hole of what is and what isn’t sophisticopop, but I’m kind of having fun doing that now because I think the bands we mentioned probably, like if we go look at a list, I bet we were correct about all that. But anyway, so the video to this is not remarkable. It’s just one of those like kind of faux live videos.
I mean, it is. This is an 80s video if there ever was one. It’s just great.
It couldn’t, it would be hard for it to be more 80s. Again, not one of OMD’s finer efforts. I dont think it’s not a bad song.
I mean, it’s definitely not a bad song. But coming on the heels of, of, of if you leave, it certainly wasn’t that kind of hit. Speaking of which, you know, that’s kind of one of the reasons I chose MD2.
One was to highlight them as a pioneer of electronic music. I really think if you haven’t gone back and listened to some of their stuff and really thought about it in context of the time it was made, you should do so because they really are more important than I think they get credit for. But also, you know, so we’re talking about kind of doing this retrospective of 120 minutes.
And this is an example of a band that managed to go big on the pop charts and score a huge hit with if you leave, which I think hit number 4 in the US, and they were already, they already had some pretty big hits in the UK, but this one was by far their biggest. And still, you know, on 120 minutes. They were straddling that line between massive commercial success and yet still getting kind of the the love and the recognition from from the college radio crowd and like the 120 minutes crowd, which I find kind of interesting.
What was this song a big hit? I was trying to… I was trying to look that up and I saw that it was a single.
I saw that, but it didn’t look like it was a huge hit. But I kind of liked it. you know, it’s catchy and I loved the video just because it’s so 80s. Like, when I, when if I had a, a young person asked me, like, what is an 80s video?
Like, that one would probably make the cut, you know? It’s just that fake live, like, you know, performing on some weird American bandstand thing, you know? But the thing I found interesting about OMD like digging into them a little bit, and they are considered pioneers of this electronic music.
You know, kind of like we had talked about on a previous episode about simple minds about how they had this whole career being like a huge band before, you know, they got on a John Hughes soundtrack. And OMD kind of has the same story. Ironically, for me, I saw them both live together and didn’t still didn’t know that about either one of them, but I saw OMD open for Simple Minds, would have been 86 or so of 87.
Like, Simple Minds was touring on the album that had alive and kicking on it. So I’m not sure exactly. I think that was 85.
So yeah, that’s probably about the… somewhere in there. 85, 86. I saw those 2 bands play live and still didn’t know that before I saw them, that they had this career of being sort of pioneers, you know?
I think the interesting thing, other thing that I’ll say about OMD, is that if, you know, obviously I typed OMD into my search engine and found this song, but if I hadn’t, and that song just came on, it would take me about 18 seconds to know that that’s OMD, that guy has an incredibly distinctive voice. And the interesting thing is that a lot of bands had that voice. Like the Thompson Twins guy has that voice and there’s a, but, but OMD’s guy has it in spades. like just way more than anybody else has it.
And so it’s a very recognizable sound. But yeah, this I found this song, you know, you had said it really wasn’t one of your favorites, and that probably isn’t mine either, but I really found this to be just a great little hooky, catchy 80s electronic pop song, you know? And yeah, it kind of fits in with a whole lot of stuff that sounds just like it, but I don’t know.
I got a kick out of this one. I liked it. Yeah, it’s not a bad song.
It’s definitely not. I think it’s not one of OMDs best. I don’t think and they don’t think, I think, based on, you know, what they were talking about with the album, just not really being what they wanted it to be.
It didn’t really do well on the charts, even in the UK. The, really, the only song on this album that did chart in the U.S. was Forever Live and Die, which actually is one of my favorite. And it is on this album.
So this album wasn’t just a total loss either, but, you know, if you leave hit like number four. I think before that, they had so in love, which charted in the US. They charted really well in Europe off of those really early albums more so than in the US.
Like, I was looking at some of their songs that, like, number one in Portugal and Spain, and Belgium. So like they had this, this real European falling way before they, they kind of did cross over and hit big. But I did find it interesting that even, even early on, 120 minutes.
Uh, a show which, as we’re gonna get into later in this episode and certainly in future episodes, pick some really frigging obscure music. I mean, there is some obscure stuff in here. Also played a band that had a number 4 hit in the US just a year before.
So I think it’s, it’s going to kind of set the stage for the conversations we have that some of these bands that we’re going to be talking about are huge bands that were maybe getting their 1st national exposure on on 120 minutes or maybe like OMD, just we’re kind of favorites of the people that were programming. You know, and that’s kind of how I feel like OMB made it on to this list is they were just a darling of the kind of people who were programming 100s. I don’t know if this was a conscious decision or not, but if you look at the list, like there’s a lot of there’s a whole lot of bands on here that nobody’s ever heard of, but there’s also a lot of bands on here that you have heard of, but the song they played is not the one you know. like you’re saying, you know, let’s play OMD, but not that song, you know, and there’s other ones on here too.
I saw like General Public is on here. Gene loves Jezebel is on here. Those bands had been hits, you know, and but not these songs.
But so I think maybe that was a conscious decision to sort of, okay, you like this band, but here’s one of their songs that you’ve never heard before, or, you know, or maybe you haven’t heard enough or whatever the case may be, but I think that might have been a conscious decision. I don’t know. There’s also a deal where some bands kind of hit the mainstream for a little bit and then slide back into a little more obscurity, and I think 120 minutes on some occasions would play songs by bands, kind of after they had had their big peak, and were kind of on the backside, a band that might have started out a little, you know, more obscure, and then kind of hit the mainstream and then comes down the backside of it, they might not have hit that big peak, but they might come back to them, you know, after the fact, to kind of give them, you know, the material afterwards, a little bit of a push.
A good example of that being, I remember seeing the video for, 0 gosh, now the song escaping the NXS song from Welcome to Wherever You Are, the 1st single off that. I remember seeing that on 120 minutes. Of course, NXS had been big at one point huge, actually, one of the biggest fans in the world.
But at this point, they were kind of on the backside of that. And they had been a band that had been an 120 minutes darling earlier in their career. And so we kind of saw them come back the other way.
And that might be what was going on here is maybe after the success of the John Hughes film. And if you leave, maybe, you know, they’re kind of getting back to playing these guys as they’re coming down the backside of that fame. To me, this one was like OMD by numbers, like paint by numbers, man.
Like, it is about as generic an OMD track as you’re ever going to come across. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s like, if you fed a modern AI, the instructions to, you know, do a song in the style of OMD from 1985. This is the song you would get.
It’s like, it’s what they do in its most generic form, in my opinion, to the point where I don’t have any of their albums. I don’t have any other their individual albums, but I do have their greatest hits, uh, collection. And after listening to this song, I had to pull the CD and look to see whether it was on the greatest hits collection or not because I couldn’t remember it, whether it was or not.
There’s a version of it on there. There’s a 12 inch version, or at least on the version of the greatest hits that I’ve got. But yeah, it’s not a bad song, the video, like you say, is extremely 80s up to, and including the geometrical shapes flying around, which, you know, nothing says the 80s video, quite like random geometrical shapes, you know, in your video or whatever.
Oh, it’s it’s all there. The co-live crowd, the haircut. I mean, the outfits, like, like it is an 80s time capsule.
It would be hard to be, it would be hard to, like, improve up on it as a as that. Yeah, exactly. But it’s a good song.
It really is. This is a totally generic 80s electronic pop song, but I don’t know. I just kind of got a retro kick out of it, like kind of took me. good.
It really is good. It’s a bad song, but I just found it. it really catchy. you know, I’m not putting this on the car and listening to it, but I just I just watching the video, I had a really good time for 4 minutes, you know? I just chose the OMD’s a good band.
I mean, that’s the thing, is like they were very good at what they do, and even when they were on autopilot, it was still better than what a lot of bands were cranking out. And you know, the other thing is, I also listened to that 12 inch remix because it popped up on Apple Music. It’s not any different from the single version.
It’s just longer. It’s one of the, you know, there were different kinds of 12 inch remixes back in the day still are. Somewhere they radically change things or bring new things in or, you know, make something fast or slow or whatever.
This is not bad. This is just a longer version of the song you already heard. You know, it’s just just extended a little bit.
And, you know, a clean 32 on the front of it to makes it into something. That’s really all it is. The old copy paste remix, yeah.
All right. So we started talking about some of the bands that appeared in January of 87 on 120 minutes. Also worth mentioning that this episode, I was going to say the 1st episode, but there were a couple episodes in 86. were starting in in 87, hosted by downtown Julie Brown. which is going to be interesting. that too.
Yeah. Obviously, I think all that is is that at this point, they did not know what this show was yet. Right.
You know, it becomes something later on. And obviously, I think like the heart of this show for us is going to be like the Matt Penfield era, probably. Obviously, at this point, we’re just like, okay, we’re going to try this out, get a different VJ to host it every week, you know.
Yeah, because nothing says alternative music like downtown Julie Brown. Yeah, that’s why I was so surprised is… Yeah, I noticed that, too.
But yeah, I really think at this point the show is still sort of without a rudder, you know, just kind of putting the feelers out to see what they can get out of it, you know. And if you look at the playlist, that says that too. It’s, it’s very sort of random and yes, all of these are relatively unheard of, quote unquote alternative bands, but there’s not, there’s not really any flow to it or any format to it.
It’s just kind of, let’s look through the music library and pull all the stuff that has the fewest plays. You know, it almost feels like that, you know. It really, yeah.
It really it really does. Like, you know, you mentioned a few, Gene Loves Jezebel General Publics, you know, Iggy Pops on there, concrete blonde. So there’s some well-known people, and then some obscure stuff.
And then I think I think it’s safe to say the band you’re going to talk about Keith was kind of more in the well-known category at this. I mean, they’ve never been necessarily huge, but they were probably a little more on the well-known side of this in 87, but you know more about that, like their timeline than I do. So…
Yeah, at this time, the song I want to talk about today is infected by… I can give you up. So that’s me.
With your love. Lust me into sickness. Let me back Dummy, we forget.
I’m not… And, you know, at this time, they probably were at kind of the hype of their popularity. Yeah, I don’t know, I would say a couple more albums, I guess, probably is really where they hit the height, but this is where they’re kind of getting to the point where they’re going to start getting popular.
This album was big in the UK, not so much in the US. But before we get heavily into, you know, talking about this video in general or the in general. I thought it might be kind of fun just to talk a little bit about videos, you know, because this is a departure from what we had done with the 35,000 watts podcast.
And the 3 of us all grew up in the 80s. I imagine a lot of our listeners probably did too, which, of course, was the time when videos were going were becoming really a necessary part of the music business, you know, like if you wanted to be really successful, you had to have a music video and a lot of that, you know, had to do with MTV, you know, and TV coming around in the 80s and making videos a big thing. MTV could make or break careers at that point in the 80s, you know, you had bands like Duran Duran, who obviously are kind of a classic example of a band that always gets cited as having been really helped by MTV.
And I think this is a good band. Duran Duran was a great band and they’re in the rock and roll Hall of Fame now, they had great songs, nothing about the quality of Duran Duran that says they wouldn’t have had hits, but, you know, you look at those videos from the 80s, especially the Rio era videos like the title track Rio and Hungry like the Wolf, and those songs, you know, those videos got huge airtime and playtime on MTV and really, you know, helped launch that career. I don’t think it’s a fact that Durand wouldn’t be a big band without NTV in the 80s, but would they have been as big as they were?
Probably not. I don’t think you can you can say that they would have been. It also could go the other way.
There were people who had their careers wrecked by videos at that time, the classic example of being Billy Squire and the Rock Me Tonight video. Yeah, Scotty obviously wasn’t that one. If you haven’t seen a video for Rock Me tonight, go out and watch it, and then contemplate how anybody involved with Billy Squire’s career could possibly have let that thing go off the line.
That’s what I don’t get how anyone let him do that. Oh my god. Yes.
Like, oh, man. It’s so bad. I mean, there are a lot of bad videos from the 80s, but holy moly.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s essentially Bully Squire in a what’s made out of a stage area made up to look like a bedroom that could have been the backdrop for like a Patrick Nagel painting back in the 1980s and he is prancing around and writhing on underground and acting like a preteen schoolgirl singing into her brush before she, you know, goes to see her favorite band or whatever. It is horrorously, epically bad. Yeah, I have no idea how that happened.
And basically, like I said, we went his career. This guy went from playing, you know, sold out arenas to play, you know, in front of a couple of dozen of his closest friends like overnight. Really was a good artist and he just disappeared after that video.
Yeah, he had big hits. That video, maybe you know, times were changing. Maybe he wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway, but you can definitely look at that video and say it was the turning point in his career where things went from him being a relatively solid, hard rock hit maker to being a guy that we talk about on this podcast is having one of the worst videos that ever got made.
It was epically bad. So yeah, in TV, it had a big footprint, man. Not only was it the 1st time you could really see some of these artists, but it also kind of served as like a national radio station at a time when the river wasn’t such a thing.
You know, a lot of the consolidation of radio stations hadn’t really happened yet. And NTV provided a music source where, you know, both on the east coast and the west coast at the exact same time you were hearing and seeing the exact same thing. And so it kind of, it had a footprint in that way as well as being something that kind of was able to launch music into the national zeitgeist even in a way that radio probably couldn’t at that time.
For me personally, I grew up in a small town in West Texas, and we had MTV on our cable system for all about 15 minutes before a group of parents, you know, wrote the cable company and probably with the backing of one of their local churches, if not all of the local churches, telling them, hey, we don’t want our kids, you know, to have to see this smut and blah, blah, blah. And yeah, so we didn’t have MTV. Like I said, it lasted for like a couple of days, literally, before it was gone.
For me personally, when it came to seeing videos. The 1st time that I ever remember seeing it, music video was on HBO of all places. I don’t know if you guys remember the early days of HBO.
They had a little interstitial deal they called video jukebox. That was the 1st time I ever remember seeing music videos. I remember seeing Michael Jackson beaned it on that or I guess Billy Jean on that.
I remember seeing Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie. So they had some good stuff on it, but yeah, that was the 1st time I ever remember seeing videos. And then the place where I really got most of my videos as a kid was on WTBS on weekend nights on a show called Night Tracks.
WCBS was the precursor to the current cable station TBS at the time, it was a broadcast station out of Atlanta, but they got added to a bunch of cable systems because they carried Atlanta Braves baseball games. And so cable early cable systems were looking for stuff to add to their lineup, WTBS got added. And on the weekends, they ran a show that started about 10 or 11 o’clock on Friday and Saturday nights, ran most of the way through the night to like 3 or 4 in the morning, called night tracks, and it was just music videos.
I don’t really call them really having like VJs in the way NTV did. They just played videos. And they played a lot, a lot of moonstream stuff, but they also played a lot of kind of out there stuff too.
I remember a lot of the early British invasion, like kind of new age, 2nd British invasion stuff, seen for the 1st time on night tracks on TBS. And so for me, you know, not having MTV. That was kind of my window to the video world.
I don’t know about you guys. I don’t know if y’all remember. Scotty, you remember video jukebox at least, but did you guys did y’all see Night Track?
You know what I’m talking about with that? I think so. Yeah, that sounds familiar too.
But yeah, I definitely remember the HBO thing. I think Showtime did that too. They would play videos in between the movies and stuff like that.
They ended up showing trailers or whatever. But yeah. I just wanted to say this real quick just because it’s an interesting story.
You mentioned Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie. When my friend, I want to say I was like in 5th grade. So this would have been like 81?
maybe? when did MDB launch? Is it 81?
It was the neighborhood next to mine. My neighborhood didn’t get cable too much later. But they had cable.
And this thing called MTV came up. We went over to my friend’s house after school and turned it on, and Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie was the very 1st video I ever saw. on MTV. Oh, wow. creepy one, man.
Shockingly. So I grew up in a small town in the mountains of Colorado. It’s like we didn’t have, we definitely didn’t have cable and we couldn’t afford a satellite dish.
So I didn’t not have access to MTV or TBS or anything until I got to high school, so that would have been like 1988. So not even, you know, the year we’re talking about. I hadn’t really been exposed to it.
But I had seen it at my aunt’s house for a week when I when I stayed with her, and I actually, I think I remember the very 1st video I saw, I was like in a store and just was watching like, you know, the they had the big TV displays. This will tell you how long it was before I actually probably saw a music video. First time I saw MTV, I will say, was Aerosmith Angel.
So that would have been like 87 was the 1st one I really remember like watching MTV. We were we were way isolated. What I did have access to early on, way early on, like around 8081 was VHS by a band called Devo called The Men Who Make the Music, and they were making music videos that, you know, were not intended for MTV because MTV didn’t exist, but ended up getting released or they’d get show, they’d get shown on, on like a screen during one of their live concerts and stuff.
And so I did watch that as a kid, but I didn’t even, I don’t think I even knew that like what I was watching was a, you know, quote unquote music video, and this was like a VHS that had, uh, it was like an hour long, and it was kind of strung together with different weird skits and stuff that they did. Skit’s not the right word for that. Which kind of brings me back to what you were saying, Keith, about the evolution of videos in MTV, because Devo early on had these videos that they had made for whatever reason, and MTV played them a lot because that was all they had to play.
Like, there was not a lot of videos out there for MTV in those first, especially the 1st like couple years, and it opened the door for bands like Devo, who later on would probably never have been able to get their foot in the door on MTV to get like a lot of exposure, right? So I think from like 81 until about the time we’re talking about bands that maybe were not in the in the zeitgeist or the mainstream and would later have never have been able to make it on NTV were on NTV just because they were the only ones that had videos. And I kind of wonder if by the time you get to 87, which is what we’re talking about now, now getting on MTV is a big deal, now you have record labels shelling out a lot of money for music videos.
And so music videos like a promotion, a promotional tool that everyone in every label is kind of chasing, I kind of wonder if that’s where the genesis of 120 minutes was, was, okay, now our airwaves are filled with nothing against these guys. Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, you know, all the big, huge names are making videos and that’s obviously where we’re going to play 99% of the time. Now we need to carve out this little 2 hour space on Saturdays for the Devos of the world or the those of the world or whatever that aren’t going to make it on the mainstream because now we’ve got a glut of videos.
We can, you know, we have the luxury of playing any band we want at this point. And now we’ve got to kind of carve out a little tiny bit of space for these bands who, in 81 or 82, were getting played like in regular rotation, you know? There’s something interesting there.
And I’m not sure where, I’m not sure where my brain’s going with this, but I was thinking about, you know, Keith, you mentioned Duran Duran, and I think that’s an interesting thing because what Duran Duran did, and they’re not the only ones, but there are a lot of bands like them, that what happened was Duran Duran was out there making music, rocking along, whatever. And then MTV came along and the girls got to see them, and that’s when they launched into superstardom. I saw Duran Duran live on the 7 and the Ragged Tiger Tour in a sold out arena.
There were 6 male people in that band and 5 of them were Duran Duran. one was me. They got to superstardom because people got to see them, you know, and I think that’s a big part of things like them and Madonna and Prince, you know, and Michael Jackson. You know, these artists were as much visually interesting as they were musically interesting.
But then on the other side of that, you have a band like Devo that was doing these really interesting videos and had a really interesting sort of presentation that you didn’t get to see on their albums. And I think about the bands maybe like even before that. And these are contemporaries of Devo, but they weren’t doing videos.
A man like the B-52s. who are as interesting visually as they are musically. Like, their look is a big part of who they were. But in 1977 when they came out, there was no video.
The fact that this kind of launched that part of it too, where a band that had an interesting visual aesthetic could get seen, you know, and maybe that’s a big part of a lot of these bands, you know, maybe MTV thought, this music is sounds like all these other guys, but look at these guys. Maybe there’s something we can do with that. You know, I don’t know.
I’m not sure where my brain is going on that. But there’s something there. There’s something to the fact that this wasn’t just pointing cameras at musicians.
It was trying to visually represent something that maybe you, you know, you weren’t getting out of just listening to an album and that opened the door for a lot of different and more interesting bands. I think, you know, even as back as far as the Beatles, they were had made some films that went along with some of their songs. You know, they weren’t really what you think about as being music videos, but putting together a video clip or whatever we want to call it, to go with a song.
I had been around for a while, you know, and talk about Devo doing it in the late 70s, and it was, it was stuff that was done. But yeah, it was it was MTV that drove the music video, normally become a mainstream thing, that made it become a thing where if you’re going to be successful, you have to have a video. It was like doing, like we talked about in Madonna and Prince, right?
They did come out and dominate the 80s MTV, you know, airwaves, but they also have the song. That’s one thing you can’t, you know, take away from those guys. You know, there were a lot of music videos that were made back in those days that didn’t get that kind of airplay because they didn’t have the song.
The bands, you had to have a video and it had to be a good video, but you also had to have the songs to still be successful. I feel pretty strongly about that. I don’t think it was just a video thing.
Even though they had been around a while. Like I said, you know, even as far back as the Beatles, people were making these clips. songs had to be good for sure. I think Debo is really maybe the best example.
Those guys were probably not going to get a lot of mainstream radio play until people could see them and sort of embrace how weird they were and, you know, see some visual interpretation of it. Well, I was going to say really quickly, the UK had something that the US never really had, which was top of the pops. So you had this weekly show where people saw bands coming on and kind of performing live.
Sometimes they lip synced. changed throughout the years as to how, and eventually they started showing videos as well. But there was this kind of weekly thing where people gathered around the TV and it was a big deal and was a very big deal for a long time. US had American bandstand.
What’s that? The American bands, yeah, I guess that would be, like, you at least got to see one or two. I don’t think it was as…
I don’t think it was as accepted by the young people as something like top of the pop shows. That show was huge, but American Man Sand did have live music on occasionally they’d have a band on lipsticking, obviously, but, you know. Yeah, and you had bands on Fridays.
You had bands on Saturday Night Live. I mean, I say Fridays because Devo was on. I remember Devo being on Fridays and so there was like occasionally these little glimpses, but MTV was what I think to Keith’s original point was what finally gave a consistent and available outlet for that visual aspect of a band to do with what they wanted.
And some bands would not do much with it, like with the OMD video that we just talked about, where they just kind of like, it was almost like they didn’t really want to do a video, but we got to, so we’ll get up on stage and blah, blah, blah, to the one that Keith’s about to talk to right now, where it’s a, I mean, that’s, you know, this the video is. There’s a lot of thought put into what what you’re seeing and what story he’s telling visually. and there was everything in the rainbow between that, you know, between the just kind of half-assed videos and the really, really high production value, high concept videos, like, and everything in between started coming out. and all the other shows were great. and and I do remember, you know, shows like Friday night videos and and eventually the WTBS when you were talking about, I think I saw, but but really, ultimately, there was a time when you could turn into MTV almost any time of day and watch a music video and that was, That was a big deal. That was a really big turning point.
Theoretically, that’s what TV was supposed to have been. It was during its 1st few years, it just kind of changed as time went on. Oh, did it change?
It got too culturally big. had to grow into something more. I think the way MTV went was inevitable. When something is that popular, you’re going to try to take it different directions and get things that the videos in and of themselves were never going to get like solid ratings, but a show, like the real world.
You know, people tune in at this time on this day to watch that show. They got ratings, they got more revenue dollars that was inevitable. Everybody likes to whine about it, but there was no other direction for MTV to go.
It had too much of a hold on the cultural zeitgeist. They could do whatever they wanted. And they decided to turn that into dollars and they did.
So, I mean, you can’t you can’t really blame them. You can miss it all you want, but you can’t really blame them. And I guess what they, what’s some point, they produced the in TV 2 or whatever it was that was supposed to be the video show or video channel?
That was kind of after I was out of MTV. I don’t really know how that went or whether it was any good or anything, but… They did that.
And then again, they decided they needed something more focused, so they started showing reruns of the real world. Right, right. You know, and it just, it just became, it literally became MTV 2.
Just reruns, you know. You know, and the funny thing about all of this is that, you know, as a kid, as a fan of music videos and watching my night tracks on the weekends and occasional HBO video jukebox, it always seemed to me like there should be video albums. Like if you got an album that’s got teen songs on it and you’ve made a couple of videos, why not make a video for all of 10 songs and put out a video album?
And I know now, of course, I’m a little bit older. I was a kid back then when I thought that that was something that ought to be happening. I realized there’s production costs and stuff like that involved in making a video now that there might be a little prohibitive to that.
But I always thought that was going to be something that was going to take off. I just it always was astounding to me that it never happened. I mean, you had stuff like Purple Rain where there was a movie that was print songs in it and even the videos that came out of those songs had some scenes from the movies and that kind of stuff.
But in my mind, what I was thinking about was just an album or a video collection of a video for every song on an album. There were a handful of them that did come out. And one of those was infected by the dud.
They produced a video for every song on that album. And part of that had to do with the way the band was structured. I’m a big fan.
I won’t talk a whole lot about them at this point, but that was basically one guy. It’s Matt Johnson and then whoever he happens to have playing with him at the time. And after he finished the infected album, he didn’t have a touring band to go with him, but he wanted to promote the album.
And so they decided what they were going to do was make a video album, make a video for each one of the songs, and that he would then take that out on tour, go to theaters and places and play it, and then do a Q and A after it. And that would take the place of a promotional tour playing concerts for the album. And his record logo actually gave him a pretty decent amount of money.
They gave him £350,000, which I don’t know exactly what that translates into in dollars. But this is the 80s we’re talking about. It was a sum of money that they gave this guy to make his music videos.
And the thing about Matt Johnson and is, like I said, I won’t go heavily into him. But for my money, to this day, Matt Johnson is the best lyricist that I have ever come across. He just writes great lyrics.
He writes love songs. He writes kind of, you know, political, state of the world type songs, he writes introspective stuff, and he is really good at all of it. Like I said to this day, I think he’s the best lyricist that I’ve ever come across.
The problem is that Matt Johnson knows he’s a very good lyricist. and wants to be a good lyricist and wants to write deep, heavy, you know, lyrics with meaning, and these songs are important and need to be considered. And, well, okay, you know, so he’s like, he’s capable of a Ugomaniac. He’s a serious young man making serious art with a capital A. And as you might expect with these videos, if you’ve got a serious young man making art with a capital A, some of them are so over the top that they’re almost unintentionally funny.
I mean, some of these videos are not great. The 2 that come quickly to mind with that are out of the blue, into the fire, and Sweet Bird of Truth, which pans me, Sweet Bird of Truth, is one of my favorite songs on that album. But the video for that song.
That sort was written from the perspective of a fighter pilot or a military pilot whose plane is going down. And then, of course, Matt Johnson sings one side of the chorus, and then it kicks over and there’s some female backup singers who sing the next line, and it goes back and forth in kind of a call and response way in the chorus with Johnson and then the female singers. Well, in the video, Johnson was decked out in like a flight suit, you know, like a pilot suit, and then you go got the helmet on and everything.
And when he gets to the chorus, he’s in the cockpit of a pone, and it’s like a, there’s like a little deal splashing Mayday up above his head, and he’s like struggling with the stick, trying to keep the plane up while he’s lip syncing the words to the song. But it cuts to the thermal vocal part of it, and there’s this like bombed out, blasted area, and there’s this woman standing there wearing these long, flowing white robes, and then she’s got giant set of wings, like angel wings spread out behind her. One of her hands, she’s holding out.
She’s got a skull in her hand, like doing the whole pouring Warwick thing, like holding it out in front of her. And she’s stolen off into the middle distance. And so the, the, the fuel of, you know, part of the verse or of the chorus of the song.
And it is so hilariously over the top. I mean, like, I can’t imagine anybody saw this and said, yeah, that’s awesome. This is what we really ought to do on this.
I mean, it is completely over the top and really funny. Fascinated to see where that was going to go because I didn’t get a chance to watch that video. Oh, yeah.
I highly recommend it for no other reason to see that one. Actually, I was like, where is this going? Yeah, it takes itself incredibly seriously.
Some of them work. You know, there are the ones that don’t work. There are some that do the video for Heartland is the only one on there that’s kind of a performance video, but it’s just him and the guitar in like a warehouse and there’s like some video kind of goes along with the theme of the song playing behind him.
And it works pretty well. There’s one called Slow Train to Dawn. when the £350,000 had run out at that and yeah, you’re probably right, exactly. Well, we got this warehouse for another day.
Why don’t we just… Take this little problem out here, put the projector in here and make a quick video. But there’s another one for the song Slow Train to Dawn, which is a duet with Ninna Cherry, and she’s in the video, and it’s really good.
It’s probably the best one on there. It’s black and white. Johnson is like in a train engine, like locomotive, like, you know, feeding coal into the boiler kind of thing, and Cherry is tied to the tracks as the train that he’s engineering is barreling down straight toward her, and it cuts back and forth between them as they sing the verses.
So it’s a good one. It’s a good one. So there are some good rules on there as well as kind of the comical ones.
Most of them are similar in between those 2 things, infected being one of those. It’s a pretty good video. It’s Johnson strapped into a chair, like with his rig holding his head steady and like he’s a prisoner of some sort, and 1st he’s on a barge floating down a river.
Then we’re carrying them through this city. They end up with him still strapped into this rule in front of like a mission style old school church, like putting kindling all around him and then setting it on fire. And then it backs out and somehow Johnson’s in the crowd watching the fire burn instead of in the suit where he was the entire time.
And it’s fine. It’s pretty good. The imagery of home on the big contraption is on the barge coming down the river is kind of neat.
The best, the biggest swoon in cannibal, the best kind of out there moment of this whole thing is the video for the song, uh, Angels of Deception. And for most of Matt Johnson’s career, all of his career, his artwork, album art, was done by his brother, a guy named who went under the name Andy Dog as a visual artist. And he had a very distinct style and, like, purposefully ugly, would be probably the way I would describe it.
His most famous one for them was the cover of Infected for the single, which was a devil masturbating on himself on the record sleeve, which promptly got banned in a lot of places. The sleeve for the single perfect has got Johnson, a drawing of Johnson sitting on a bench with what appears to be a corpse right beside him that’s got its arms slung over his shoulder. And so it’s all kind of like distorting imagery like that, done in like a way that’s supposed to look particularly ugly, like, you know, purposefully ugly.
And the video for Abels of Deception is done in that style. It looks like a visual like interpretation of an Andy dog painting. And, you know, up to the point where it’s got some like model cityscapes that are done in his style and there’s makeup on Johnson’s face to make him look like he’s drawn in that style.
And it’s really cool. It works really well too. Well, some of these videos are like patently absurd.
Some of them actually are really good. And again, it’s kind of a thing where you got a guy that’s taking himself really seriously, who’s been given a large sum of money and so told to produce great videos for this song, these songs that he thinks he’s written, you know, fantastic lyrics for and all that. So, like I said, you kind of expect some of it to be a little over the top.
You get that. But overall, it was a pretty good attempt at a video album. like I said, a concept which I, back in those days, really thought was going to be something that would take off. It didn’t.
It never really happened. But there were a few of them out there. This was one of them.
And in January of 1987, they played the video for infected by the on 120 minutes. I have to say, this video was for 1987, really good. Like, it was obviously had some money behind it.
It was, you know, it was more interpretive than performative. It was, you know, all of those things that you really didn’t see a lot at this time. I thought it was really good.
The, though, for me, has always been one of those bands that I love their singles, but I’ve never dove very deep into their catalog, but I did have this album at one point. I do have a funny story, just a quick anecdote. So my 1st foray into the happened because of this.
I was watching daytime talk show Donahue back in the 80s, um, and they were doing a show about the PMRC, basically, like putting stickers on albums and whatever, and they had, I don’t know if Tipper Gore was on there, but some representative of her organization was on there. They had many artists on there, and one of them was rapper iced tea, and this was not the old cool iced tea we know now. This was young, wearing all black, bandolier of bullets around his chest, you know, angry street gangster iced tea.
And they were asking him about, you know, is there any music you listen to that would get these stickers on it besides your own. You know, is there like other music that you listen to that we would probably put these stickers on that you don’t think it should be on? And he mentioned like 6 rap artists, and then out of the blue.
He said, I just heard this really great album by this British band called the The, it’s called Mind Bomb, and it’s a great album, and it would probably have the language sticker on it, but it’s great. And that was good enough for me. If Ice T thought it was cool.
I went out and put mind bomb on the strength of that. They should have sold that album with like iced tea approved stickers on it, man. It would have sold.
I would have done so much better. Yeah, so anyway, that’s the way I got into the, though, was because Ice T told me to check them out. Of all the people on the planet.
I really got a kick out of this video. I thought it was really, really well done for its time. I thought it was maybe ahead of its time a little bit.
It was very, it was very cool. I did not get to see the whole video album. I wanted to, and I just, I couldn’t dig it up, but now Keith, you gave me a little bit better idea on how to find it.
So I will do that and watch it. So everyone is trying to find it. I have a VHS copy of it, but I don’t have a VCR that functions anymore, so I couldn’t watch it that way.
But I did find it on YouTube. I just searched for the album infected full album and I found a version of it that had all 8 of the videos tacked onto the end of it. It had just the audio tracks.
And then I think there was a couple of other songs, like some 12 inch mixes in there. And then the last 8 tracks on what was like a, you know, an 18 or 20 track playlist where the videos of each one. So if you’re looking for it, you know, have a look for that on YouTube and you should be able to find it.
Yeah, I think I think you covered it pretty well. And you filled in the blank for me, which was, how why is this? Why is the production quality so good?
And why is this, like, not a crappy late 80s video from a relatively unknown band that doesn’t probably have a huge budget, but he actually apparently did have a huge budget, and why not? Like, yeah, like, instead of a touring budget, that makes sense, because I was wondering, like, wow, I did not think the label would put this much money behind the, because, you know, you, it’s shot on location. There are multiple scenes and it’s, it is, you know, pretty, it’s like a short film in a way.
It’s kind of like a short film of a magic trick almost. It’s kind of like you see him like go through all these things and then he does like the magic trick at the end where he’s like, haha, I’m actually in the crowd. And then I do have the one question really is all I’m hoping you might be able to answer any significance to the Coca-Cola hat at the end because it’s very obvious.
Like he’s he’s very prominently wearing a Cocoa Cola hat and he very clearly wants us to see it at the end. Maybe a chunk of the 350 K came from Cocoa. Yeah, right.
More, I, you know, I don’t have any idea why that would be, although more Matt Johnson and his, you know, stand on commercialism and all that kind of stuff, I would think rather than it being Coke having kicked him some money to wear a hat, he thought there was some kind of like statement and wearing a, you know, like anti-establishment statement and wearing a coke hat. Maybe, don’t know. But no, I actually don’t have any idea why that coke hat is so prominently displayed, but…
He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy that would take money for product placement. So it probably is some sort of anti-product placement statement. I mean, that’s how I like that.
You know, the Neil Young video, this notes for you. They got banned famously. He was basically making fun of product placements.
Maybe something like that. Yeah, that was my assumption, but I didn’t know if there was a story maybe behind it or not. Not that I know of, yeah.
All right, and now we’re gonna talk about, so this is the 1st time we’re doing this and we actually talked about before the episode. It was kind of cool. Scott picked a song that he had never heard before.
There, like we mentioned, there’s a lot of obscure music that came up on 120 minutes. And, I mean, the 3 of us between us have, we’ve listened to a lot of obscure music in our life, and we still are seeing a lot of bands we’d actually never heard of, or sometimes a band maybe that we’d kind of heard of, but not a song. So I think in the future, we’re actually going to make sure that we have at least one song every time.
This was just kind of Scott being willing to go out on a limb and try something that he hadn’t tried before because there were several bands that he does like on January, but this might become a regular feature, if you like it, let us know, but Scott’s going to go out on a limb for us and he picked a good one. So I wanted to preface this by saying that, yes, I went through this list of songs. There were several of them that I had never, never heard the song, never heard of the band.
And that is one of the ones I’m going to talk about now, but I wanted to kind of just preface by saying that my lack of knowledge on this band or this song is not an insult to them, it’s an insult to me. As someone who prides myself, I’m knowing a lot about music. I’m always a little bit shocked when I see a band or hear a song that I’d never heard before from an era that I was kind of into music.
So I say that because there’s a pretty good chance that this is someone’s favorite band. And I don’t want to insult that person by saying, well, I’ve never heard of it, you know? I’m saying I’ve never heard of it as a negative on myself.
So that said, I went through this list of songs and I listened to all the ones that I had never heard before. And one of them really struck me as being a super great song that I had never heard before. And that is the band Dump Truck, and the song is called Secrets.
If I had a thing that would tell you, I would. But I Right now It seems so funny to say that I don’t know what to say. So, I’m gonna go just a little bit into the history of Dump Truck, because I find it very interesting.
And maybe it’ll help us sort of come to why we’ve never heard of these guys. So this band is formed in the early 80s, I want to say 83 by 2 guys. Their names are Seth Tivin and Kirk Swan.
They are both the principal songwriters, singers, and guitarists for the band. I think I think that Seth Tippin does most of the singing, but there’s a little bit of vocal back and forth. So they are from Boston.
They put this band together. They start, you know, rocking out around Boston or whatever. They get a recording contract and they put out an album in 83 called D is for Dump Truck.
That album is a little bit maybe more goth influenced than just straight up rock and roll or power pop or jangle pop, whatever you want to call this song. I think Jangle Pop is probably the fairest explanation, but it’s a little darker, but it does get some traction. It’s getting some college radio play.
These guys are starting to make a little noise in the music world. And then in 85 or 86, I think, is when they put out this album. So the 2nd album is called Positively Dump Truck.
I think it is interesting to note that it was produced by Don Dixon and recorded at Mitch Easter’s studio. I mentioned that because these two guys are both heavily connected to REM. And I think that if you listen to this song, you will hear a little bit of REM’s sort of sound at this time.
This definitely, to me, sounds like something that could be on reckoning or Fables of the Reconstruction. And ironically produced by the same guys that produced those albums. So, I think that’s, you know, interesting to note.
So this is the part where maybe why we haven’t heard of Dump Truck. They put out their third album. It’s called for the country.
It’s a little more country influence, the 1987, and they go on tour. While they’re on tour, the checks they are getting from their label, big time records, start to bounce. And it turns out that Big Time Records has let their contract expire and is also in a lot of financial trouble.
So the band gets wind, that big time records, in an effort to recoup some money, or whatever, is trying to sell dump truck to another label, phone, when dump truck hears this, they go to phonograph and say, don’t deal with them, deal with us, you want to sign us, sign us. This causes a major lawsuit from big time records, suing phonograph records. And because of this, the band is now seen as litigious and a pain in the ass, and they cannot get a record deal to save their life.
The litigation on all this goes on for 3 years. It’s now 1991, they still don’t have a recording contract, and they have lost any heat that they had based on, you know, the where the trajectory they were on before is gone. So the two main guys moved to Austin, they break up the band.
All of these guys have since done some solo projects. They’ve even recorded his dump truck a time or two. Riko Disk has put out, rereleased all of their albums, and the greatest hits album.
There was a member of this band for a while. He wasn’t there the whole time, but his name was Kevin Salem. He went on to work with Yola Tengo and Mercury Rev. These guys have a little bit of pedigree.
But I really think that, look, I’m not going to sit here and say, these guys could have been REM. I don’t think that’s true. But I think they could have been a whole lot more than they were.
And based on this song, I think that I may be onto something there. This, for what it’s worth, is a fantastic song. And the video is kind of like we talked about with OMD.
It’s a little corny and they’re kind of… The video in the comets. Somebody described it as the grinners performing, strumming on wood.
I was like, yep. It’s a bunch of happy guys strumming on wood. It’s a very corny early 80s video.
But I think the song’s fantastic. I’m curious to see what you guys thought of this. Anyway, as going through a list of songs I’ve never heard before. listening to them and finding this one.
I think I kind of found a gem. This is a really good song and I really enjoyed it. So I’m curious to see what you guys thought.
It was super enjoyable. Like, the lyrics are kind of tongue in cheek and kind of funny. I was wondering if at some point they had a fight with the drummer or if the drummer was really ugly or whatever because you don’t see the drummer until about halfway through the video and then also it’s like, oh, okay, there it is.
Because you can hear the drummer. find anything about that. But I will say that, you know, according to what you can find on these guys. The 2 main guys really were the band and everybody else was kind of a revolving door.
So what it might be is that the guy that recorded this song is not the guy playing drums in the video and there was something with that. Yeah, he definitely is relegated somewhat. And so, like, you see, 3 guys initially, and then there’s the 2 guys who probably are the 2 guys you’re talking about that kind of get, like, their own, like, 2 shots for a little bit.
I definitely heard the REM connection and I didn’t know. I kind of didn’t do any research on the band because I was curious just to let you for me, so I’d hear it for the 1st time. And so like hearing that it was Don Dixon and the connection with Don and Mitch and the studios in North Carolina is really interesting because the sound is definitely there and the influences are definitely there.
I imagine they were maybe also influenced by Lets Active, which was Mitch Easter’s band, and they almost had to have been exposed to him and his music while they were, you know, working with Don Dixon. And again, it definitely shows in the music and I being a huge REM fan, as most people that listen to the podcast. No, yeah, like, I’m definitely on board.
So I’m curious, I’m probably gonna dive a little deeper into it. I have to say, when we started talking about why they didn’t get bigger, whatever, of all the ideas I had floating around my head, like, label, lawsuit, fight was not one of the things that I thought probably happened around these guys’ career. Yeah, me neither. that’s that’s it.
And I really think that’s maybe the reason. I’m not like I said, I don’t think these guys would have been like the next REM or anything, but I think they definitely would have had a more pronounced career than they had. The other the other band that Don Dixon was working with at this time is the smithereens.
And I think that’s maybe even a better connection to what these guys kind of sound like. if you like the smithereens. It definitely sounds like that. Yeah.
So for me, 1st off, I really liked the song. I like the kind of lo-fi aesthetic of it a little bit. I liked the high range, kind of almost Peter Hookish bass part.
The only thing that kind of throws me a little bit is the part where it breaks into the little the guitar solo part where there’s 2 times in the song. I wouldn’t really even describe it as being a middle 8 because it, like I said, it happens twice, where it hasn’t just nothing to do with what’s going on in the rest of the song, and then it breaks into that little bit and he plays his guitar, and then it comes back into the song. For my money, the song is so good that it overcomes those little interludes, but I didn’t like that part of it.
Like, to me that they broke the song too much. It was too much of a big change right in the middle of the song for it to really hit as hard as I think it could have if they had just kind of gone through and then had like more a more standard middle eight that kind of followed what they were doing in the rest of the song. But man, that’s my only complaint about it.
And like I said, even saying that, it didn’t really take away from me enjoying this song. But you guys mentioned, you mentioned, Ari, when we mentioned smithereens. I had, in my head, a band that popped in immediately when I heard this song, and that was Sebedo, the Lou Barlow band Sebedo.
Like, this song, to me, could be on any one of Sebedo’s records. Like, that was immediately what I thought of, was like, this sounds to me like a Sebedo song. You know, it’s interesting you say that because, like I said, one of the guys in this band went on to work with Yola Tango and Mercury Rev, who are also very similar to Sebedo, especially Yola Tango.
So, man, yeah, maybe that is more of the influence. I didn’t make that connection, but that’s a good one. All this time, these bands owe in their sound to dump truck and we had no idea.
Yeah. Who knew the influence of Dump Truck on the world, but… That’s why we’re doing this show, man.
You know, I dove a little deeper into these guys. I will say that this is far and away their best song of the ones I listen to, but this album that the song is on, the one that was produced by Don Dixon is pretty solid cover to cover. It’s a pretty good album.
This song is definitely a standout. The album before it is a little darker. The album after it is almost almost pure country.
It’s still that sort of country rock thing that, you know, all the bands we mentioned are guilty of, but maybe even more so than that. But this album, they really, they really hit the nail on the head. It’s good.
I did a little more digging on them myself. Also, as you mentioned, they moved to Austin, and I was looking at one of their albums actually came out in 2006, which is at a time when I was living in Austin, and just looking at it, it looks like they were an active band, probably playing around town at that time when I was living there. But I don’t remember ever hearing anything about them or seeing anything about them, and they probably like showed up in, you know, like ads in the little, you know, news magazines and stuff for playing around town.
But somehow I never, never connected with these guys, never saw them at the time when they would have almost certainly been playing around Austin while I was there. But, man, I wish I had. If I’d had I known that dump truck was what they are, I would love to have seen these guys back in that time.
Yeah, I bet they were a pretty solid live band too, honestly. I mean, their sound is so lo-fi. It’s got to, it’s got to almost sound like that live too. you know I would think.
Yeah, you would think so. I think the name doesn’t help them. Probably not.
Because of the genre. Like I fully expected this to be a much more of like a late 80s industrial maybe kind of band or I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this at all. I thought it was going to be harder.
I thought it was going to be more garage rock, sort of, you know, the fuzzy guitars and that kind of thing. but it’s, man, it’s not that at all. It’s, it is, you need a definition of jangle pop. That song, at least, is it.
Oh, it’s jangly. This is why we are going to have to do this every episode because, like, just going off the beaten track and finding a band like this is this might end up being my favorite part of the show, honestly, because, again, like, if people are listening to this maybe for the 1st time, or even if you’ve heard this before. Like, the 3 of us, we’re not neophytes, when it comes to late 80s and 90s music, like we listen to a lot of music.
You know, we worked, we all worked in college radio. We worked in other forms of radio. We just lived, ate and breathed music for that period of our life for sure.
When a band comes along that we haven’t heard of, and there are gonna be way more than I would have thought as we work through this. It’s kind of amazing, and especially when one slips through the cracks that kind of like hits all the buttons for us that we like. Like, this is a band that I absolutely probably would have listened to. when I was listening to it, I was thinking, man, if this had been like a Dallas band, we’d have been playing this on KTXT nonstop.
Like, this is the kind of local band we would have championed for sure. I wonder if before our time at KTXT, if this band didn’t get some spins, because, you know, this would have, they were their heyday was 83 to 88, basically. That’s all way before our time there.
But they, according to, you know, what you can find online, they were having songs chart on modern rock charts and stuff like that, like they, this song, I couldn’t find how high it went, but it did chart on the modern rock charts, you know? So it’s kind of interesting that they disappeared because I think maybe some college, so well, I shouldn’t say that. Some college radio stations were absolutely playing them, but I think KTXT was probably one, two, you know, it just somewhere between 87 when they fade out and us getting there in 90, 91, 92. you know, somebody pulled it off the shelf and and put it away and there’s a there’s a vinyl of dump truck collecting dust at KTXT somewhere right now.
When you said that, I was like, well, I have that old KTXT playlist from 92, and it’s a master playlist, so it, you know, it has everything that was in rotation at the time, and dump truck is not in rotation as of 1992. It could have got pulled. Although we didn’t.
But that’s a good 5 years after their, you know, fall from grace. So they might have gotten some play there back in the day. don’t know. Yeah, interestingly, alphabetically speaking, we go from Dukes of Stratosphere to Dust Devils on KGXT, which is actually 2 bands I know nothing about either, so that’s a whole other story.
Yeah, and dump truck would fit right in the… Literally. Oh man.
This was a lot of fun. I think I’m really gonna enjoy this. Thanks for tuning into our very 1st episode of 120 months.
A shout out to 120 minutes.org. So there are the website that for over a decade now has been compiling all these playlists. They have been really, like, scouring the internet and people have been sending in, you know, people that, like I said, this was something that a lot of people tape on VHS because it came out on Saturday night, at least for a long time, and I, you know, a lot of times we’d be out and about, but we would tape it or share tapes and stuff.
So people are kind of constantly sending in playlists to 120 minutes.org so that they can compile and they’ve gotten to the point now where they’ve essentially compiled every show of 120 minutes. They still have a few holes here and there. We will be leaning on them heavily for this information, so I want to give them a thank you, a shout out.
We’ll try to do that every episode because really we, I don’t know that we would have done this without them. That was where I kind of got the idea to do this was was their website. So thanks, shout out to them.
I would encourage people. Two things. One, the way I sort of went through this was I got on YouTube and watched all these videos in order. like they would have aired on 120 minutes.
Now you don’t get the downtown Julie Brown talking about them in between and stuff like that. I think as we get further on, you are going to find those things. You’re going to find an entire episode of 120 minutes on YouTube eventually. when we get to the later in the year.
These aren’t there. But all these videos are, and you can watch them all kind of in order and sort of, I don’t know, have a little fun trip back to what this was at the time and what the videos looked like and how they kind of flowed together. And then the other thing I would encourage anybody listening to this, if you look at one of these playlists, and you see a song that maybe you liked and you know not very many people know and you want us to kind of take a look at it and talk about it or whatever, I would love to do that.
I would love to take a look at, I’d love doing this with Dump Truck and saying, this is something I never heard, and I really did find a good song. You know, if there’s one of those out there, if you looked at this list and said, man, I really wish they’d talk about, you know, one of these other songs that we didn’t really know about. I would love to do that.
I think you guys would too, to dive into something that we haven’t heard before and maybe find something new. Yeah, totally agree. Yeah, that’d be a great way to kind of get some songs that we haven’t heard before.
Do you know, some stuff that we could talk about that none of us knew. Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah that’s a good idea.
I imagine a lot of these bands are going to have like some regional love where it’s like, oh, man, yeah, everybody in New England knew about this band, whereas, you know, a lot of us, like, I was in Colorado and then Texas, and we have kind of our bands that, you know, we fell in love with that maybe didn’t get national recognition, but if they got to 120 minutes, that was like a big deal. So I imagine there’s a few of those where it’s like, oh, you guys got to check these guys out. We thought they were gonna We thought they were going to hit it big because they got it on 120 minutes this one time, but they didn’t.
And I’m also curious to see if I really haven’t gone through all the archives yet to see what’s coming up. I almost kind of don’t want to in a way, but I am curious to see if any of the bands that we kind of championed on KTXT, which ones made it, you know, to the show as they say, and got on 120 minutes, because I’m sure that was a big deal for bands, you know, that were smaller, like local regional bands that were doing the college radio circuit and doing like the local club circuit, and then to have that pop on MTV must have been huge. And so, yeah, if you have a favorite band or like a, especially one of those bands that just sort of, you were like, man, I wish they had gotten more recognition. those are the bands that we really would love to talk about.
But we will also talk about, you know, some of the some of the big ones like OMD and on this episode. So a lot of fun. We definitely will be back.
Next episode with February of 1987. Thanks again for tuning in. I’m Michael Miller for Scott Mobley and Keith Porterfield.
This has been 120 months, and we will see you next time.